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I recently saw discussion about PBR materials being added to Doom3BFG with folks also talking about it on Discord. One of the things I always wanted from PBR is proper reflections, especially in a way that works on all FM's new and old without requiring changes (eg: new light entities). Lack of proper reflections is one of the biggest limitations we still have, leaving us with mere boring specular reflections lacking any detail. While currently we can't have things like metallicity or per-pixel roughness, not even the ability to use the skybox or player camera feed as a reflection map, we do have a generic cubemap used only on windows and a few special textures. So the thought itched me: What if we could make every material with a specular map also blend a cubemap reflection? I've done Linux batch scripts for complex tasks before, so after lots of searching (and dealing with DOS era line terminations getting in the way) I managed to create a bash script that will do just that! This 50 line script will detect all materials with a specular map, inject a customized cubemap reflection, then repack everything. It scans every material in TDM thus it changes all map textures models and entities alike, everything gets modified to benefit from this. Modifications are NOT made to the official pk4 files, instead a single pk4 named Z-tdm_materials_cubemap.pk4 is generated to override the old defs, you can revert at any time simply by removing this one file. The cubemaps are subtly blended in without using extra vertex / fragment shaders which should have minimal performance impact, they also respect the bump map of the material and are deformed by it... each cubemap is masked by the specular map which gives it a close feel to PBR, materials without a specularity texture are considered rough and remain unchanged. Simply download the script and use it in your TDM folder, you'll need either Linux or a bash environment on Windows (untested): material_cubemaps.sh #!/bin/bash # Add cubemap reflections to all TheDarkMod materials containing specular maps # Use sub(/\r$/,"") to fix DOS line termination, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45772525/why-does-my-tool-output-overwrite-itself-and-how-do-i-fix-it # Unpack all materials mkdir "temp" for f in *.pk4; do unzip -o $f "materials/*" -d "temp" done mv "temp/materials" "temp/mtr" mkdir "temp/materials" cd "temp/mtr" # Inject cubemap code into all materials with specular maps, the reflection is masked by specular intensity # First ensure the file contains at least one definition that need to be modified to avoid needless repacking for f in *.mtr; do awk '{ sub(/\r$/,"") if($1 == "specularmap" && $2 != "_black" && $2 != "") exit !f }' "$f" if [ $? == 1 ]; then awk '{ sub(/\r$/,"") print $0 if($1 == "specularmap" && $2 != "_black" && $2 != "") { print "" print " // Cubemap reflection for specularity" print " {" print " maskcolor" print " map makealpha(" $2 ")" print " }" print " {" print " blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one" print " maskalpha" print " cubeMap env/gen3" print " texgen reflect" print " }" } }' "$f" > "../materials/$f" fi done # Pack modified materials cd ".." zip -r "../Z-tdm_materials_cubemap.pk4" "materials" rm -r "../temp" At the moment I haven't done a full comparison and only tried it out on a map I'm working on: It's possible I might do my next TDM stream with this on which will allow others to see it better. From what I'm noticing it's pretty much perfect: Very subtle and doesn't disrupt visually, it does improve realism in a lot of cases as you move around and see the shine... given the texture is almost always masked and distorted by bump you don't feel the reflection is ugly and fake but it feels natural. Currently this is here as a mod for players that wish to use it... not gonna lie part of me is tempted to suggest it be considered for 2.11, it's definitely an improvement to having no reflections at all until a better method is found. Please try it out and share your own thoughts and images, below are a few screenshots I took during my first test to confirm it works as expected.

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon